1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to data streaming and, more particularly, to systems and methods for selecting bit rates to enable trick play modes through stream switching, and adaptive streaming.
2. Description of the Related Art
A stream may be described as an encoding that includes a sequence of frames. In one example of a stream, the sequence of frames may be of different types. For example, in an advanced video coding (AVC) (similarly for MPEG 1, 2, 4) encoded video stream, I, P, and B-frames are employed. Furthermore with AVC, these streams can be encoded at a fixed bit-rate with arbitrary dependencies between the video frames.
Trick play refers to playing out the multimedia at variable playout speeds, e.g., fast forward, rewind, or slow motion. The term “rate” is used to refer to the number of bits per unit time, and the term “speed” is used to refer to the playout in terms of the number of frames in unit time. Due to the predictive nature of the video frame encodings, achieving an increase in playout speed by naively increasing the decoding rate at the player and streaming to sustain the rate would increase the streaming bit-rate; and potentially strain the network.